This week, we will release an update to Windows Live Essentials 2011. In addition to changes that improve performance and quality of service, the update also includes full support for SSL in Windows Live Mail, and the latest Bing bar. Here are a few of things we think you’ll find the most interesting:

Mail: We fixed a sorting issue in the Sent items folder and improved the upload reliability and instrumentation in Photo mail.
Messenger: We fixed a couple of stability issues and made various changes for improved voice and video quality. We fixed an issue that was causing sound to be lost after upgrading, and we improved performance when displaying the MSN Today page in the main window.
Photo Gallery: We implemented various bug fixes for crashes related to launching Photo Gallery through Autoplay and facial recognition.
And more: We made many other usability, performance, and stability improvements across the suite of Windows Live Essentials apps.

We will be rolling this update out in 2 phases. Starting this week, it will be available at http://explore.live.com and on Microsoft Download Center. Later this month, existing Windows Live Essentials 2011 customers will be prompted to update to this version. At that time, it will be offered as an optional update. You can see if you already have the latest and greatest by checking the build version number in Help About, which for this update is 15.4.3538.0513.